Review of the GAW Miners Hashlet Digital Cloud Miner

19Aug 2014

A few days have passed since the introduction of the GAW Miners Digital Cloud Miner – the Hashlet and we’ve been testing it since the sales of the cloud miner have started and we have purchased a 5 MHS Hashlet. So now it is time to do a report on our experience using the miner and of course the thing that probably most of you are wondering about – the profitability you can expect. We already have some numbers to share, even though at the moment the Litecoin and other Scrypt-based crypto coins are not very stable in terms of price and the trend if going down and not up. With the current unstable market situation you need to be careful and wise when doing a decision to invest into a mining service or ASIC miner, unless you believe that things will soon improve and the prices will get back up as many people into crypto currencies do.

After purchasing a 5 MHS Hashlet, a relatively quick and easy process, though it sometimes might take a bit more time than we needed, we have moved to activating our hashrate in the ZenCloud website. The ZenCloud service is that is also used by GAW Miners for the hosted ASIC miners, including the Scrypt and SHA-256 devices, however since we haven’t used the service before it is new for us. If you have purchased a hosted miner you may already be familiar with the service and how it operates, but we’ll go through the important things for the people that are new to it like us. One very important thing to note is that the Hashlet is a digital cloud miner for mining Scrypt crypto currencies in a multipool and you are getting paid in Bitcoins.

The main Dashboard panel is the place where you get all of the basic details that you need when you login to your account – information such as the current hashrate or what was the last payout that you got. Do note that the Hashlet gets current and hourly hashrate reported, however the generated payment is credited to your account once every 24 hours. The Dashboard page gives you the total amount of coins earned for the last 24 hours, however the actual amount you get is a bit lower due to this number not reflecting the deduction of the maintenance fees. On to top right of every page you can see what is the current amount of BTC you have in your account since the last payment and their average USD value based on the current Coinbase exchange rate.

The Miners panel from the menu on the left is where you actually add the Hashlet that you have purchased by redeeming the ZenHardware code that you have received and then you get to see the Hashlet you have purchased, but unless you set a mining pool it will not start to mine. Setting a mining pool could be a bit confusing at first as you need to drag the pool icon from the Altcoin list of pools on the right over the Hashlet, or you can use the Batch Update pools if you have more than one Hashlet to make it easier.

Once you drag the pool icon over tha Hashlet, below you will see the icon of the pool appear and the expected daily payout from that pool based on the estimation for your hashrate from the previous day. Obviously the highest payout is the ZenPool as GAW Miners have promised, but you can alternatively select to use Clever Mining, Multipool.us, NiceHash, TradeMyBit or WafflePool as alternatives. The important thing here however is that regardless of which pool you choose you are not setting worker information and you are only getting paid in BTC directly, so you cannot mine some altcoins and get them in your account with the Hashlet – only direct Bitcoin payments. Below you can see what are the current 24 hour estimated for 5 MHS Hashlet with the different supported pools.

These numbers show that the ZenPool gives a bit over 20% higher profit as compared to the second most profitable pool in the list, and how exactly do they manage to get the extra profit apart from the lack of pool fee we do not know. Do note that these numbers represent the expected profit without the maintenance fee, so what you actual get credited in your account may be less. You can however also get more depending on the price fluctuations on the specific day of mining, especially if the prices the previous day were low. Even though we seem to be seeing pretty close numbers from day to day so far.

The Latest Activity panel is kind of history log on what have you been doing in the control panel, logging the time and the action you have performed. The next panel called Balance is that one you will want to use more often as it shows the list of your financial transactions – the mined coins and the maintenance fee. It can be a bit confusing as it apparently shows first the maintenance feed deducted and then the full amount of mined coins added the same as in the Latest Activity. This way it seems that for the first day we have not been deducted any fee, even though we have mined for just a few hours as you can also see from the amount of mined coins.

The Balance panel is also the place where you can either deposit or withdraw BTC in your account. Both buttons however do have some weird rounding applied as per the current Coinbase exchange rate that makes entering an exact value real pain in the ass, and while it may be useful when depositing BTC, it is really annoying when withdrawing as you want to enter an exact value that you have in your account. If you are wondering why you would need to add BTC in your account, the reason is simple – to purchase more Hashlets from the ZenMarket panel instead of going through the standard purchasing procedure that you need to go over if you do not yet have a ZenCloud account.

We’ve been talking about the fee, but we have not yet mentioned what exactly is the maintenance fee that you need to pay for the Hashlet digital cloud miner. It has been set to $0.08 USD per MHS per day, so for our 5 MHS Hashlet we need to pay 40 USD cents per day for the fee from our total mined coins. Our profit for the first day of mining (only a few hours actually) was lower than $0.40, however we were not deducted a fee for that day and after that for the next two days we have managed to get the fee to be about 1/4 of the total mined coins or with other words close to 25% with the current not so favorable Scrypt prices. Obviously since the Hashlet is not time limited cloud mining contract, the time that it should expire is when the mined coins are not enough to cover the fees as this would make the miner unprofitable and you would not want to actually have to pay to be able to continue mining instead of making money from it. This is the way we understand and expect things to go with the Hashlet as this piece of information regarding the lifetime of the digital miner is not clearly described by GAW Miners yet.

Below you can see what the actual earnings are by days that we have accumulated in our account from mining so far with the 5 MHS Hashlet. Note that these are the values with the maintenance fee already deducted from them. The first number in BTC represents the total account balance after that specific day, the number with plus in the brackets shows the actual mined coins for the specific day other than the first one (this is minus the fee) and in the end of the line you can see the average estimated USD price of the available coins.

Day 1 (only few hours of mining)
– 0.00061710 BTC ~ 0.31 USD

Day 2
0.00314709 BTC (+ 0.00252999 BTC) ~ 1.48 USD

Day 3
0.00580333 BTC (+ 0.00265624 BTC) ~ 2.83 USD

Day 4
0.00825451 BTC (+ 0.00245118 BTC) ~ 3.90 USD

Day 5
0.01116123 BTC (+ 0.00290672 BTC) ~ 5.84 USD

Day 6
0.01366939 BTC (+ 0.00250816 BTC) ~ 6.92 USD

Day 7
0.01627877 BTC (+ 0.00260938 BTC) ~ 8.27 USD

So the current actual profit for 5 MHS Hashlet is equivalent to about 1.20-1.30 USD per day after we deduct the maintenance fee from the mined coins. That would mean we’ll need around 65 days (a little over 2 months) to get a return of the investment of $79.99 USD for purchasing the 5 MHS Hashlet if the conditions remain the same – something that will hardly happen. We already know that the network difficulty will most likely continue to increase, but what we don’t know yet is what is going to happen with the price of LTC and other Scrypt-based crypto currencies in the next 2-3 months. So in fact we can ROI faster or slower than that number of days, depending on a lot of factors, but breaking even in just about 2-3 months does not sound like a bad thing as after that you can expect to actually make some profit. How much actually depends on the purchased hashrate and the current market conditions when you have earned enough to cover your initial investment. Do note however that since you are getting paid in BTC, if the Bitcoin exchange rate for example doubles you can instantly lower the time for ROI, but if the opposite thing happens the time will double. And as we usually do recommend, do not invest more than you can afford to lose if things do not go the way you planned it. It is also not a wise idea to invest all in just one place, so think about spreading to multiple services.

14 Responses to Review of the GAW Miners Hashlet Digital Cloud Miner

It is really good to see an article finally spell out to people what they can expect to make. I am an avid mining though I don’t ever expect to get my investment back with the way things are going. Kudos to the author.

Very good article, I am using the Hashlet and I will hope to do well. By the way, you should have include in the article the Zenpoints, you earn Zenpoints while you leave your BC in the Zencloud, each zenpoints are 0.000001 btc. What I do not know is how to perform calculations win those Zenpoints, for example, I got 61 ZP yesterday and today I got 72 ZP. When you go to buy another Hashlet yours Zp are deduct the final amount. Greetings

One of the problems present with the ZenCloud is that there is still not FAQ or Help section to get you familiar with all of the available features if you are a new user and not already familiar with the system. For example for the ZenPoints you need to go look around for information like in the hashtalk forum where they were announced in order to understand what they are exactly, but first you need to get some in order to be interested in learning what they actually are. Essentially they act like some sort of an interest rate that is there to encourage you to keep your mined coins in your account’s Balance and not to constantly withdraw them. And the ZenPoints can only be used as an extra discount when purchasing more hashrate, you cannot withdraw them as BTC.

This service is bad for Litecoin, because they pay out in Bitcoin…which means they dump every single Litecoin they mine for Bitcoin, to pay their “subscribers” (because that’s what you are – you’re not mining, you’re being paid a “royalty” basically). Constant dumping of Litecoin for Bitcoin is super unhealthy.

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